response to a post and a comment

Just saw this post by Jason Hills, who has quite often found fault with me over the months. Nonetheless, his question here is interesting, and it even has an answer.

“Undermining and Overmining… are they the new ‘reductivism’ and ‘master narrative?’ That is, rather than accuse someone of reducing this to that or providing a master narrative of phenomena that lurks behind them as puppet-master, we now accuse someone of under- or over-mining?

My point?

Is this really a new concept, or just a re-deployment of an old one? I am fond of the latter move, though I do insist that we realize what it is.”

First, I’m probably not the best target for the charge of old wine in new bottles. After all, on the entire speculative realism landscape I am perhaps the most likely to show links between my own ideas and those of the tradition. In much contemporary continental thought, for example, it is common to use the adjective “classical” as if it were an automatic refutation. “This remains a classical procedure,” as Derrida often says, is treated as a death blow. By contrast, I’m the one who’s trying to revive lots of classical concepts, especially from the Aristotelian tradition.

Jason now asks what’s so “new” about the undermining/overmining pair. Well, “undermining” isn’t really a new charge at all. Any anti-reductionist position is essentially accusing its opponents of undermining, though that isn’t usually the term that is used.

“Overmining” is both a new coinage in the English language (in the past it always meant to draw excessive amounts of metal from a mine), and to some extent a new concept. After all, to claim that there is nothing hiding behind appearances and events, and that it is superstitious to posit some “substance” lurking behind such appearances and events, is still generally taken to be the hip, cutting-edge position, while to posit something behind the given is widely viewed as a reactionary retreat to the world of hidden substances and essences. On this theme I am taking the unpopular view, and am openly arguing for something hidden behind appearances, effects, and events: namely, withdrawn objects. And that position is, to some extent, new. There are precursors, but I’ve talked about them at length– far from attempting to conceal my sources, as Jason so oddly implies.

But what is truly new is the linguistic link between undermining and overmining– namely, the idea that reducing things downward and reducing them upward are simply two sides of the same coin. One could only make this claim if, like me, one holds that the whole of philosophy unfolds in the widely despised middle ground that is neither made (reducing downward) of tiny particles/ultimate mathematical structures nor (reducing upward) of events or effects or appearances or linguistic manifestations.

I’ve taken advantage of a lucky feature of the English language, in that the prefix “under-” of “undermining” can be flipped to produce the neologism “overmining.” Don’t think that’s lucky? Well, you should have tried to be my French translator. Olivier Dubouclez really had to put his thinking cap on to come up with a French version of these terms, since none of the equivalents of “undermining” in French have that sort of prefix.

But Jason Hills has never been known to cut me much slack on anything, so I wasn’t surprised to run across a critical post by him.

More surprising was the comment by “Leon,” which if it’s the same Leon (as I have reason to believe it is) is someone whose last several emails to me were extremely harsh about some of my friends, but were also extremely positive about me. So, I wasn’t prepared for this sudden turn towards the negative by Leon, but so be it.

Here is Leon’s comment on Jason’s post:

“Leon said…
Agreed. And what is so novel about windowless monads? Just because something is *new* doesn’t mean that it is *original*.

Back to my sour-faced crew.”

First of all, “sour-faced crew” is an apparently deliberate red herring. As Leon knows, I applied that term to a different group: one to which he himself does not belong. (But there is admittedly something a bit “sour-faced” about his comment to Jason’s post, even if it wasn’t the product of a “crew,” at least as far as I know.)

Second, as for “what is so novel about windowless monads,” I’ve dealt almost ad nauseam with the similarities and differences between object-oriented philosophy and Leibniz. But in case anyone missed it, here’s a summary.

The “windowless entities” aspect of my philosophy certainly has some points in common with Leibniz. What I do not share in common with Leibniz is as follows:

*I do not share Leibniz’s distinction between substance and aggregate; Leibniz only recognizes the bottom layer of the world as truly made up of substance, whereas for me, Paris might be as real an object as Quentin Meillassoux or as the protons in Meillassoux’s right arm, or as Meillassoux’s soul if there is such a thing as souls

*I do not share Leibniz’s belief in a privileged entity called God as the source of all relation between substances; if there is a God, then for me this God faces the same problem of withdrawn entities that the rest of us face

*I do not share Leibniz’s belief that a monad’s qualities are equivalent to its perceptions of other monads; quite the contrary

*I do not share Leibniz’s view that all monads are created at the dawn of time and simply perceive in weaker form until they are fully born; I happen to think that Jason, Leon, and I have not existed for more than a few decades and that Paris has not existed for more than a couple of millennia

Something Michael Naas said at DePaul when I was a graduate student has always stuck with me (and Nietzsche wrote something similar somewhere). When doing comparison/contrasts between thinkers, it’s usually the contrasts that are the most interesting, and you can generally tell how much work someone has done on the comparison by how sharply they see the contrasts. Otherwise, it’s much too easy to write a dissertation or essay or book comparing any two thinkers: “Derrida is actually saying the same thing as Plotinus,” or whatever. (I made that one up; no offense intended if anyone is actually working on that one.) Far more interesting and far more difficult is to bring two thinkers together and show that you realize the ways in which they are not the same.

As for comparisons between object-oriented philosophy and other philosophies, Leibniz probably takes the prize as the most common point of lazy comparison. Such comparisons also fail to note that the “windowless” part of my philosophy comes not from Leibniz, but from an attempt to push Heidegger’s tool-analysis more radically than he pushed it himself. Whether or not I succeeded in that enterprise is for readers to decide. But the next time I’m called a pirate of Leibniz (and the same could just as easily be said of Whitehead, come to think of it), I would hope to see at least a token effort to note the points of divergence, which are numerous.